Paula Simons: A 99th Remembrance Day of ominous echoes

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
When I was growing up, the First World War was the war in our social studies text books. It had already retreated into the past, out of first-hand memory. It was a war to be studied. To write essays about. Not a war that seemed real to us.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The makeshift grave of a Canadian soldier, buried on the battlefield at Vimy Ridge by his comrades.